Macon Bolling Allen Became the First Licensed African-American Lawyer in the United States
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M A C O N B O L L I N G A L L E N Macon Bolling Allen became the first licensed African-American lawyer in the United States. He began practicing law in Massachusetts after being admitted to the Suffolk County bar in 1845. To supplement his career as an attorney, Allen became a justice of the peace in Massachusetts, making him the first African- American judicial official. He relocated to Charleston, South Carolina, and helped form Whipper, Elliot, and Allen, the first known African-American law firm in the United States. C H A R L O T T E E . R A Y Charlotte E. Ray was the first African-American female lawyer in the United States. Born in 1850 to an abolitionist father who owned the newspaper Colored American, Ray grew up around civil rights activism. At age 19, she began teaching at Howard University, with a goal of joining the school’s law program. She applied under the name “C.E. Ray” to disguise her gender. After being admitted, she took classes and taught at the same time, until she graduated as the first black woman to receive a law degree. That same year, she was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar, becoming the first woman to do so. While she opened her own law firm, it was unsuccessful because of prejudice in the community, leading her to move to New York and become a school teacher instead. Ray also was active in the women’s suffrage movement, through her involvement with the National Woman Suffrage Association and the National Association of Colored Women. J A N E B O L I N Born in 1908, Jane Bolin was the first African- American woman to graduate from Yale University’s law school. Her father, Gaius Bolin, was also a lawyer and the first African-American graduate of Williams College. Bolin continued to be a pioneer as the first African-American woman to join the New York City Bar Association and the first to work in the city’s legal department. In 1939, she broke ground yet again as the first African-American woman to be a judge in the United States. Her appointment was to a family court in New York City, where she had a 10-year term. Bolin moved on to the New York State Board of Regents, while also having membership with the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Child Welfare League of America. T H U R G O O D M A R S H A L L Born in 1908, Thurgood Marshall grew up amid segregation. His first choice for law school was the University of Maryland, but he was denied admittance because of his race. Instead, he attended Howard University and graduated as valedictorian in 1933. Marshall joined Charles Hamilton Houston, whom he had met during law school, as an attorney for the NAACP. In 1940, Marshall founded the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Over the years, Marshall argued countless cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, most notably was Brown v. Board of Education. In 1961, Marshall was appointed as a federal judge to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City. Four years later, he briefly became the solicitor general before being appointed as the first African- American associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. N O R M A N S . M I N O R Born in Illinois in 1901, Norman S. Minor moved with his parents to Cleveland at the age of 4. He graduated from Central High School in 1921 and attended the University of Michigan for 2 years. In 1927, he graduated with an LL.B Degree from John Marshall Law School and was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1928. In 1930 Norman S. Minor became Cuyahoga County's first Black Assistant Prosecutor. Given the discriminatory practices of that day, for years in the prosecutor's office, Norman S. Minor was assigned cases involving only Black defendants. In a 1963 Ebony Magazine article, Minor gave the following response to the limits placed on him during his early years at the prosecutor's office, "...I said to myself, Norman Minor some people want you to fail, but you can't. Fail and who'll take your place?" Armed with this conviction, Minor worked tirelessly and effectively to impel equality within the prosecutor's office and to mentor Black Attorneys succeeding him. In 1948, after 18 years with the Prosecutor's Office, Norman S. Minor switched sides of the table to become a highly respected defense attorney. E A R L B . D I C K E R S O N Earl B. Dickerson was a leading Chicago civil rights lawyer, and one of the earliest African-Americans to receive a degree from the University of Chicago Law School, in 1920. Dickerson was born in Canton, Mississippi in 1891. He came to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Chicago Law School. He was drafted into the Army after his second year of Law School, where he served as a commissioned officer, and returned to finish his JD in 1919. After graduation, he served as general counsel, and later CEO, of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company. He took leadership positions in a number of organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Lawyers Guild, and was appointed by FDR to the Fair Employment Practices Committee during World War II. Dickerson fought racial discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing, most notably in the case Hansbury v. Lee (1940) in which the U.S. Supreme Court, struck down racially restrictive covenants in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. F R E D G R A Y As a colleague of and eventual attorney for Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Gray was active in the civil rights movement. Gray was born in 1930 and raised in a segregated black division of Montgomery, Alabama. He earned his undergraduate degree from Alabama State College and his JD from Case Western Reserve University. Gray represented Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks when they received charges of disorderly conduct for refusing to give up their bus seats to white passengers. He was instrumental to the Montgomery bus boycott, serving as an attorney in the civil suit Browder v. Gayle that eventually integrated the city’s buses. In 1970, Gray became one of the first two African-American legislators to be elected in Alabama since the Reconstruction era. Gray continues to practice law as a senior partner at Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray & Nathanson in Alabama. B A R A C K O B A M A Before he was the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and eventually went on to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama then moved to Illinois, where he led a voter registration drive centered around increasing black voter turnout called Project Vote. Before entering the political sphere, Obama worked as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and as a civil rights attorney for Miner, Barnhill & Galland. In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, where he served for eight years until he joined the U.S. Senate in 2004. After his two-term presidency ended in 2016, Obama began focusing more on his Chicago-based nonprofit organization, the Obama Foundation..